Month: July 2008

Last Friday the House Judiciary Committee met to discuss the Bush Administration’s abuse of executive power. For the first time the case for impeachment was discussed in front of a Congressional committee over the span of what became a six hour session, attended by twenty members of the Judiciary Committee. Dennis Kucinich and four other members of Congress testified. Kucinich called for impeachment of the President for misrepresenting a case for war.

Kucinich is now assembling signatures from an online impeachment petition which he will present to members of Congress this week. Midnight tonight is the deadline.

If you are an American and value the freedoms afforded to us by the Constitution; if you would like to ensure that a Bush Administration legacy of curtailed Constitutional rights does not endure, please consider signing the petition.

Things we can all do to make sure that this preliminary hearing turns into something more substantial:

Contact every member of the Judiciary and insist that they attend the hearing! The hearing is on a Friday and they usually don’t work on Fridays. Faxing is absolutely worth a try. If you wish to email them in one fell swoop, do so here.

To leave a comment on voicemail, the Democrats’ House Judiciary Office is 202-225-3951 and the Republicans’ is 202-225-6504. Remember that NINE House Republicans voted to send Kucinich’s latest impeachment proposal, H.Res.1345 — which stated that Bush had lied to Congress to get authorization for his invasion of Iraq — to the Judiciary Committee: Brady (TX), Gilchrest (MD), Walter Jones (NC), Manzullo (IL), Tim Murphy (PA), Ron Paul (TX), Reichert (WA), Christopher Shays (CT), and Mike Turner (OH)

Contact the mainstream media and insist that they report on the impeachment issue and cover the July 25th hearing. Write a letter to your local newspaper. Email and/or call national media outlets. A list of various media outlets can be found here.

Thanks to the little Cygwin setup/upgrade app, I periodically come across useful new utilities. For example, even though I’ve only been playing with these two for a couple of days, I’m already wondering how I ever did without them.

multitail

multitail renders multiple tail logs in an ncurses-formatted window. Perfect for monitoring access and error logs at the same time. Much better than interleaving multiple logs with tail. Now I don’t have to squint through output in an attempt to figure out which data is from which log.

since

since is tail with a memory. Whereas tail displays the last 10 lines (or whatever value you define with -n/--lines) of a file, since starts from where you left off the last time you ran it. This is an excellent tool for when you you’re toggling between watching a log, tweaking configuration parameters, and then returning to log monitoring.

You login to a mysterious new box. There is no login message. You poke around and before long you start to wonder “So what the heck distro is this anyway?”

$ uname -a
just tells you all about the kernel. Hmmm. A mystery.

To pull up details on the distribution, take a peak in /etc/issue. This text file is often what is presented to users after they login, and typically contains distribution specific details. Likewise, look for /etc/*release or /etc/*version, which various distributions use to tag the release version.

Now that the Senate has decided to grant retroactive immunity to the telecoms (video), it probably won’t be long before the Bush Administration starts routinely tracking your search habits, mining your email, and monitoring your phone calls. This kind of automated profiling will allow the NSA to determine, among other things, your propensity for terror. Yes, soon the Bush Administration will be protecting us all from ourselves.

But I say, why wait?! I want the Bush Administration to protect me from myself right now! Am I a subversive? Could I be a terrorist? I need to know! And I’m sure you do as well.

That’s why I have started automatically carbon copying all of my email to George W. Bush. Okay, well, technically I’m carbon copying them all to Dick Cheney because it would appear that Cheney reads Bush’s email for him. But I have every confidence that Mr. Cheney will keep the president abreast of my goings on.

If you’re a Microsoft Outlook user, here’s how you too can automatically carbon copy all of your email to the White House.

In Mail, on the Tools menu, click Rules and Alerts.

On the E-mail Rules tab, click New Rule.

In the Rules Wizard dialog box, under Start from a blank rule, click Check messages after sending, and then click Next.

Click Next.

A confirmation will appear, notifying you that this rule will apply to every message that you send. Click Yes.

Under Step 1: Select action(s), select the Cc the message to people or distribution list check box.

Under Step 2: Edit the rule description (click an underlined value), click people or distribution list.

In the Rule Address dialog box, click a name or distribution list, and then click To. Repeat this step until all names or distribution lists you want to add are included in the To box.

Click OK.

In the Rules Wizard dialog box, click Next.

Click Next.

Under Step 1: Specify a name for this rule, enter a name that you will recognize for this rule.

Click Finish.

That’s it! Now all of your email will be automatically carbon copied to Dick Cheney at the White House, who will update President George W. Bush, who will work with the NSA to figure out if you are a terrorist or not. Because, let’s face it, who knows what you’re capable of? Act now before it’s too late!

There’s a lot of concern about the FISA bill, being voted on today. It’s been blocked a number of times until now.

The bill amends FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act from the Nixon administration, to give the telecoms retroactive immunity against warrantless wiretapping of American citizens — as ordered by the Bush administration. In a greater sense, the bill gives the executive branch, the president, the right to spy on American citizens without cause.

In a very real sense, FISA is the end of the American right to privacy, a kind of nullification of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. As Ron Paul points out in The Revolution, this is exactly what the framers of the Constitution warned us against. He quotes from Thomas Jefferson:

“The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.”